MALAYSIA: Experts meet in Malaysia to thrash out plans to save the threatened leatherback turtle

Conservationists and wildlife experts released hundreds of baby leatherback turtles into the sea earlier this month at the once famous Terengganu Rantau Abang turtle breeding ground, located on the east coast of the Malaysian Peninsula. It was a symbolic effort by the participants attending the Bellagio Sea Turtle Conservation Initiative, a landmark meeting to find ways to raise funding for rescue programmes that will need to run for as many as 20 or 30 years before the threat of extinction for the leatherback recedes. "I think there needs to be some effort made in Papua New Guinea to stabilise the population and ensure that we have leatherbacks in centuries to come," said Paul Lokani, who was attending the conference from that country. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) warned last year that numbers of leatherbacks had plummeted, despite strict laws banning egg sales and efforts to safeguard nest sites and build hatcheries. Poaching of eggs and turtle hunting are depleting the turtle population and global climate change is threatening their breeding habits. Leatherbacks used to be a star attraction for visitors to Malaysia's northern state of Terengganu, with tens of thousands of female turtles nesting on beaches there each year until the population collapsed in the late 1980s. The number of Malaysian leatherback rookeries has fallen to fewer than 10 nests each year this decade, from about 5,000 per year in the 1960s, the UNEP estimates. This reflects a regional trend with current nesting leatherback turtles in the Pacific, now numbering just 5,000 from a staggering 91,000 in 1980. Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, told Reuters Television that the development of hotels had brought activities closer to the shore and their bright lights were bad for turtles. Females, who venture onto land to lay their eggs, mistake lights for the moon, walk towards them and become stranded on the beach. "There's been a lot of fishing -- more fishing boats, so turtles have been caught in fishing boats, hooks and nets and people have been eating more of the eggs. And so what we are trying to do is to make everybody aware of what's going on and to get everybody on board to save the leatherback It's very, very important to do that," she added. Participants at the Malaysian conference plan to chalk out a fund-raising plan over the next six months that includes a long-term financing mechanism, such as an endowment fund, besides studying ways of getting companies to contribute. Other simpler strategies such as moving turtle eggs out of reach of predators, could also help. Fisherman Arifin Embong lamented that he had not seen a turtle for a long time. Even if we want to get or ask them to come back, it was now difficult. "They (turtles) are finished, they are gone. Where do we get the eggs even if we want to breed them," he said. Named for their leathery shells, leatherbacks are the world's largest sea turtles. They can grow up to a length of 6-1/2 feet (2 m), weigh nearly a tonne and live for 80 years. The marine turtle research programme at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now focusing on the Indonesian island of Papua, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea and Malaysia.

ITN Source | August 2, 2007

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